Thanks so much for joining me as we get down to brass tacks with this 6 week room makeover!

If you are not familiar with the One Room Challenge, we are now in the 10th season of this design makeover challenge started by Linda from Calling It Home. Every Spring and Fall we follow along with Featured Designers on Wednesday and over 200 Guest Participants on Thursday as we all showcase a transformation of a room in 6 short weeks – all sorts of hijinks ensue and copious problem solving abound!

Barry Dixon – Some stellar inspiration in the multiple textures, metal, leather, and warm tones.

If you visited me last week, I introduced my project consisting of 3 rooms – Family Living Room, Powder Room and Laundry.  I know it sounds ambitious, but the rooms are all next to each other and are visible to each other, so I really couldn’t make one room pretty and neglect the others!  I hope that I haven’t bitten off more than I can reasonably manage…but I know that it will be a huge relief to solve this less than attractive corner of my house…so feel free to cheer me along or send me wine…both will be gladly accepted!

More inspiration from Barry Dixon.  The pecky cypress boards remind me of my beams and paneling, that, along with the bricks behind, calls to mind my fireplace of antique brick.

My main room has lots of warm wood tones that I love, but I want to punch it up and showcase some wall art and other things I love and have collected over the years, at the same time doing some serious editing and refreshing.  Settle in for a LOT of plans to share with you!

I shared this Tom Sheerer room as an introduction to my inspiration, but the reason it spoke to me was the rich layers of textures, the patterned brown wallcovering, and all the red, really made my heart beat faster!

I found some great Thibaut paper that will be my starting point – a wonderful, rich, brown patterned grasscloth.  Very excited to see this go up on the walls!!

Kunqu Damask

Another thing that I love, in addition to red, is brown and black together.  I have always used touches of black to add richness to my designs whenever possible.  I have a large painting that brings in those colors and I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it….I saved up for it for quite a while, and it makes me happy every day.

The red color is coming in for the window treatment via a gorgeous print fabric, a Chinese inspired red linen I found from Lee Jofa.  There are some other options for bringing in the red and I will be looking for ways to make that happen.

Castleton Crimson Linen from GP&J Baker

Progress picture of the floor

After the first sanding pass and before the finish is beginning to be applied….I really am getting too old lazy for all this DIY!

A reminder of the Family room after I refinished the floor.  The original wide pine planks were in a sort of colonial stain, and since the wood was not old growth pine, or durable at all, they were in terrible shape.  I sanded down the surface and did a 4 step finish in a grey wash with 2 coats of water-based finish in a soft satin.  The paneling was in the same orange-brown as you saw from the before pictures in Week 1 .

I have primed out all the old, dingy, stained paneling and left only the beams and stained woodwork in the Family Room and Powder room.  I really love the warmth of the wood, but it was everywhere and needed to be lightened up!  It really screamed 1979, and in a dark room to start with, it was just too much – an entire room wrapped in brown wood boards from floor to ceiling!

Paneling painted, beams and fireplace mantle cleaned and waxed.

I am a big believer in going with a dark design in a room that has little natural light and emphasizing the cozy, even though I chose a brown grasscloth, it has a pattern and liveliness that I love.  The wallpaper is happening next week and the fabric for the curtains is at the workroom….I will be mixing in a few new furniture pieces with existing chairs that I have recovered and I will show more of the furniture plan next week!

Powder Room Stone Counter

Powder Room:  I did a lot of thinking about how to liven up this very small and basic room.  I replaced the old laminate counter with a striking granite top several years ago and really wanted a change of scenery, but wanted to work with that existing stone counter.  I had painted out an old brown vanity to Farrow and Ball “Off Black” which is really my “go-to” black paint…soft and charcoal-y…so I wanted to work with that color starting point.  I was toying with going a dark grey and worked to find a good choice for that direction.  A design colleague that is a “True Color Expert”, Linda Holt, helped me out with a little advice and I think we found the perfect dark gray!  I also had an idea to add some texture to the walls, which I will share next week after I narrow down my options!

Removing the last vestige of 1970’s gold vinyl flooring – Hooray!

Laundry Room:   I knew that I wanted something that could work with the other 2 rooms, but still be a separate space with its own personality….it is a small hallway space that happens to have the washer and dryer in it, so it gets a lot of visibility.  I wanted to have it finally make sense, instead of always being the door I was ashamed to open!  I decided to start with painting the cabinets (more brown stain!!) and the woodwork my trusty “Off Black” and see what inspiration I could find with some wallpaper to start…here is what I came up with and I just can’t tell you how happy it makes me to look at it!  Thibaut to the rescue again!!  I chose the red-orange version of happy, but I love how the yellow version looks with the white trim in the photo.  So crisp, and I can’t wait to see these papers go up on the wall!

Wood Blocks

Doesn’t that just make YOU happy?

So there you have a (VERY) LONG list of my plans for the 3 rooms, thank goodness I have painters and wall paperers to do the heavy lifting for this phase of the transformation!  I hope you are intrigued enough by my combinations of light and dark, old and new, to come back next week and see how far we have gotten along the process…. Thanks again to Linda for a challenge that gets me to the finish line in 6 weeks!  Be sure and stop by the other Guest Participants projects and cheer them on as we virtually hold each others hands!!

Cheers!

Meredith